When looking to improve your member experience and increase club revenue, your club’s engagement strategy is vital. It is traditional for club owners to spend time focusing on the first 90 days of membership, but we often see members becoming disengaged thereafter. Let’s talk about ways technology can set your members up for success no matter where they are in their journey.
COMMUNICATION WITH CLUB MEMBERS
Almost 90% of club members say they value communication from staff members. And according to the IHRSA Member Retention Report: Health club members who were at risk of canceling and received a “successful commitment interaction” (encouraging members to commit to utilizing the health club at a future date) were 45% less likely to cancel in the following month, compared to similar members who received no interaction.
Despite the recommendation above, the Engage stage of the member lifecycle journey is where we often see the largest gaps in a club’s member experience process. This stage is where technology begins to show its strength in increasing interactions between your club and members.
FEATURES FOR AMPLIFYING MEMBER ENGAGEMENT
SMS MESSAGING
With SMS, you can quickly and effectively communicate with program participants, send general club communications, notify about private lesson appointments and confirm court time reservations. SMS messages have a 98% open rate and 83% are opened within three minutes of being sent.
Beyond the superior open rate for SMS messages, studies show that consumers prefer text messages over emails for all types of communication. Use this fact to your advantage by sending your members an initial “welcome to the club” message. From there, workout milestones, club anniversaries and birthdays all make perfect reasons to show your members you appreciate them with an automated text message.
You know that one of the essential ways to retain members is to keep them coming back and participating in club activities and services. But they’re busy, and it can be hard to remember their scheduled appointments and lessons. Help your members keep track of these things by automating text message confirmations and reminders. Whether it’s a massage appointment, personal trainer session or a tennis lesson, SMS reminders can drastically reduce no-shows and cancelations, keeping your members active and engaged.
You can also help your members stay up to date on upcoming events and new classes and programs through automated text messages. Start by promoting the program or event with an initial SMS message, and then send out reminders for registration deadlines. Since text messages have a higher open rate than emails and a better impression rate than social media posts, using them will boost registrations and program participation.
As we mentioned earlier, people generally prefer text messages to emails. Moreover, your club members will read your text messages, but they will only read about 25% of your emails. For this reason, you should be using SMS messaging to communicate sales, promotions and special offers. Read more about improving member engagement with SMS Messaging.
FULLY-INTEGRATED MOBILE APP
Members expect to be able to do just about everything on their mobile device, including interacting with your club. You can give your members mobile access to make reservations, manage payment information, buy services and manage their entire member experience from the convenience of their phone.
Also, you can leverage the full benefits of a mobile app to guide your members through every stage of the member lifecycle journey. The app provides a place for transactional interactions and a way for you to always stay in front of your members by:
- Sending push notifications for an immediate, effective touchpoint
- Increasing access to association resources
- Providing a better experience at your facility
- Encouraging member-to-member interaction
- Collecting member feedback
AI (ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE)
This offers much more than increased operational efficiencies for your sales team. It can be used to engage with all of your members and to prevent member churn.
Sales AI like Conversica solves for member disengagement and churn. You can establish automated messaging sequences to reach certain segments of members you think could be at risk of cancelling their membership. Your organization could be missing out on huge member engagement opportunities simply because of the staff time it takes to keep everyone in the club invested in their membership.
INTEGRATED COMMUNICATION
A central communications tool within your membership management software is key to build on-demand email and SMS distribution lists and automate confirmations, reminders and marketing messages.
The Engage stage is all about human interaction and truly sets your club up for success in the next and final stage, Delight. Human interaction sounds great, but what exactly does that look like? Fostering engagement at your club means making time to have real 1-to-1conversations with your members and team. Fostering engagement at your club means encouraging, possibly even requiring, your team members to intentionally communicate with members on a daily basis.
Technology saves you and your team members time, reclaimed time that you can use to execute these actions of engagement.
